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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Thursday, June 12, 2014

FDA Does The Hokey-Pokey On Banning Artisan Cheese

You Throw Your Cheese Ban In, You Throw
Your Cheese Ban Out

If you need further proof that the FDA
– the so-called “Food and Drug Administration” – is totally
out of touch with reality, to say nothing of sanity, look to the
latest tempest-in-a-teapot caused by their idiotic and ill-informed
attempt to ban the manufacturing of certain artisan cheeses.

Without going into a lot of detail, the
crux of the issue involved the use of wooden boards for aging
cheeses. After centuries of producing cheese using this technique,
the Stupid Idea Fairy came along and whomped the FDA decision makers
with her wand, making them issue an edict that said:

“The use of wooden shelves, rough
or otherwise, for cheese ripening does not conform to cGMP
requirements, which require that “all plant equipment and utensils
shall be so designed and of such material and workmanship as to be
adequately cleanable, and shall be properly maintained.” 21 CFR
110.40(a). Wooden shelves or boards cannot be adequately cleaned and
sanitized. The porous structure of wood enables it to absorb and
retain bacteria, therefore bacteria generally colonize not only the
surface but also the inside layers of wood. The shelves or boards
used for aging make direct contact with finished products; hence they
could be a potential source of pathogenic microorganisms in the
finished products.”

Okay, let me get a
handle on this. The FDA grants GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe)
status to every chemical additive and preservative that comes down
the pike because the “scientists” and “experts” hired by food
processing companies say it's okay to lace our food with potentially
carcinogenic substances. But when science – and centuries of
experience – says that using wood to age cheese is a safe and
common practice, the FDA gets their panties in a wad and bans it.

I'm sure the folks
at Kraft were dancing a big happy dance. “Oh, boy, oh, boy! Our
hand picked government stooges just handed us the entire cheese
manufacturing business on a polystyrene cheese board. No more pesky
artisan cheesemakers to cut into our profits. Oh, boy, oh, boy!”

But their
celebration was short-lived, as was the FDA's moronic ban. In the
first place, the agency did not present the issue for discussion and
comment as it usually does in these cases. Nope. They just cited the
Food Safety Modernization Act signed into law by President Obama in
January of 2011 and issued their little fiat sine die. That
arbitrary action hurled the gauntlet into the faces of the artisan
cheese industry worldwide, because not only were American
cheesemakers being affected, but traditional European artisans would
likely have been subject to the ban as well. And the petitions
started flying as the online world came alive in protest.
Cheesemakers and cheese lovers from Azusa to Zanzibar started
flooding the blogosphere and the Twitterverse with outrage. They
overloaded the phone lines and e-mail boxes at the FDA and even
demanded the White House take action on the matter.

Not surprisingly, it took exactly one
day for the looney-tunes in charge to back away from their
ill-advised effort. In fact, they backed away so fast and so far as
to have denied ever issuing the original statement in the first
place:

“The FDA does not have a new
policy banning the use of wooden shelves in cheese-making, nor is
there any FSMA requirement in effect that addresses this issue.
Moreover, the FDA has not taken any enforcement action based solely
on the use of wooden shelves.

In the interest of public health,
the FDA’s current regulations state that utensils and other
surfaces that contact food must be “adequately cleanable” and
properly maintained. Historically, the FDA has expressed concern
about whether wood meets this requirement and has noted these
concerns in inspectional findings. FDA is always open to evidence
that shows that wood can be safely used for specific purposes, such
as aging cheese.

The FDA will engage with the
artisanal cheese-making community to determine whether certain types
of cheeses can safely be made by aging them on wooden shelving.”

Ah-ha! NOW they're
going to “engage with the artisanal cheese-making community.”
Yes, after having their asses handed to them, I imagine they would.
When Jonathan Swift and John Kennedy Toole wrote about confederacies
of dunces, they must have had the FDA in mind.

The upside of this
whole debacle is that people are finding their voices and making them
heard. The days of blindly trusting government agencies to safeguard
our best interests are waning. People are finally figuring out that
politicians and bureaucrats exist solely to make more politicians and
bureaucrats who feed and grow upon the largesse of lobbyists and
special interest groups. Unless the “little people” put their
faces in the faces of these Brobdingnagian plutocrats, they have no
faces, and until their whispers become roars, they have no voices.
“Pink slime” got attention and the attention got results. Yellow
5 and Yellow 6 got attention and the attention got results.
Azodicarbonamide got attention and the attention got results. But
people have to be aware and they have to be informed and they have to
act in their own self-interest because the days of the government
acting in their interest are gone, if they ever existed at all.

In the meantime,
artisan cheese producers need to keep on their toes. The FDA will not
take this humiliation lightly and will likely start looking for back
doors and shortcuts to achieve their purposes. Something or somebody
got them riled up in the first place and, while they may have backed
away on this issue for the time being, I doubt they've backed down.

One thing's for
sure: the next time the FDA regulators get together for a group
photograph, the photographer had better refrain from chirping, “Say
CHEESE!”

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)